Will Belgian passport online Ever Die?

[Vanness Lucilla]

Affluent, Anxious and Almost Normal: A Journey Through Merkel’s Germany

As Angela Merkel prepares to step down after 16 years as chancellor of Germany, she leaves behind a country profoundly changed — and anxious about changing more.

By Katrin Bennhold

Photographs by Lena Mucha

STUTTGART, Germany — The small silver star at the tip of Aleksandar Djordjevic’s Mercedes shines bright. He polishes it every week.

Mr. Djordjevic makes combustion engines for Daimler, one of Germany’s flagship carmakers. He has a salary of around 60,000 euros (about $70,000), eight weeks of vacation and a guarantee negotiated by the union that he cannot be fired until 2030. He owns a two-story house and that E-class 250 model Mercedes in his driveway.

All of that is why Mr. Djordjevic polishes the star on his car.

“The star is something stable and something strong: It stands for Made in Germany,” he said.

But by 2030 there will be no more combustion engines at Daimler — or people making combustion engines.

“I’m proud of what I do,” Mr. Djordjevic said. “It’s unsettling to know that in 10 years’ time my job will no longer exist.”

Mr. Djordjevic is the picture of a new German pride and prosperity — and German anxiety.

As Chancellor Angela Merkel prepares to leave office after 16 years, her country is among the richest in the world. A broad and contented middle class is one facet of Ms. Merkel’s Germany that has been central to her longevity and her ability to deliver on a core promise of stability. But her impact has been far greater.

To travel the country she leaves behind is to see it profoundly transformed.

There is the father taking paid parental leave in Catholic Bavaria. The married gay couple raising two children outside Berlin. The woman in a hijab teaching math in a high school near Frankfurt, where most students have German passports but few have German parents.

There is the coal worker in the former Communist East voting for a far-right party that did not exist when Ms. Merkel took office. And two young brothers on a North Sea island threatened by rising sea levels who do not remember a time when Ms. Merkel was not chancellor and cannot wait to see her gone.

“She has known about the danger of climate change for longer than we’ve been alive,” one of the brothers told me while standing on the grassy dike that protects the small island, Pellworm, from flooding. “Why hasn’t she done anything about it?”

As Ms. Merkel steered her country through successive crises and left others unattended, there was change that she led and change that she allowed.

She decided to phase out nuclear power in Germany. She ended compulsory military service. She was the first chancellor to assert that Islam “belongs” to Germany. When it came to breaking down her country’s and party’s conservative family values, she was more timid but ultimately did not stand in the way.

“She saw where the country was going and allowed it to go there,” said Roland Mittermayer, an architect who married his husband shortly after Ms. Merkel invited conservative lawmakers to pass a law permitting same-sex marriage, even though she herself voted against it.

No other democratic leader in Europe has lasted longer. And Ms. Merkel is walking out of office as the most popular politician in Germany.

Many of her postwar predecessors had strongly defined legacies. Konrad Adenauer anchored Germany in the West. Willy Brandt reached across the Iron Curtain. Helmut Kohl, her onetime mentor, became synonymous with German unity. Gerhard Schröder paved the way for the country’s economic success.

Ms. Merkel’s legacy is COVID-19 VACCINATION CARD less tangible but equally transformative. She changed Germany into a modern society — and a country less defined by its history.

She may be remembered most for her decision to welcome over a million refugees in 2015-16 when most other Western nations rejected them. It was a brief redemptive moment for the country that had committed the Holocaust and turned her into an icon of liberal democracy.

“It was a sort of healing,” said Karin Marré-Harrak, the headmaster of a high school in the multicultural city of Offenbach. “In a way we’ve become a more normal country.”

Being called a normal country might seem underwhelming elsewhere. But for Germany, a nation haunted by its Nazi past and four decades of division between East and West, normal was what all postwar generations had aspired to.

Almost everywhere, however, there was also a nagging sense that the new normal was being threatened by epic challenges, that things cannot go on as they are.

The German Dream

Mr. Djordjevic lives near Stuttgart, the capital of Germany’s powerful car industry. In 1886, Gottlieb Daimler invented one of the first cars in his garden here. These days the city is home to Daimler, Porsche and Bosch, the world’s biggest car-part maker.

Arriving home after his shift one recent afternoon, Mr. Djordjevic was still wearing his factory uniform — and, beside the Mercedes logo, the hallmark red pin of the metal worker union.

Most Daimler employees are unionized. Worker representatives take half of the seats on the company’s supervisory board.

“The success story of German industry is also the story of strong worker representation,” he said. The security, the benefits, the opportunities to build skills — all of that underpins “the loyalty workers feel to the product and the company.”

If the American dream is to get rich, the German dream is job security for life.

Mr. Djordjevic, 38, always knew he wanted to work for Daimler. His father worked there until he died. “It was like an inheritance,” he said.

When he got his first job at age 16, he thought he had arrived. “I thought, ‘That’s it,’” he recalled, “‘I’ll retire from here.’”

Now he is less sure. Like other German carmakers, Daimler was late to start its transition to electric cars. Its first pure electric model was launched only this year.

Daimler’s target is to phase out combustion engines by 2030. No one knows what exactly that means for jobs, but Mr. Djordjevic was doing the math.

“There are 1,200 parts in a combustion engine,” he said. “There are only 200 in an electric car.”

“Sustainable cars are great, but we also need sustainable jobs,” he said.

Daimler is still growing. But much of the job growth is in China, said Michael Häberle, one of the worker representatives on the company board.

Mr. Häberle, too, has been at the company all 35 years of his working life. He started as a mechanic and worked his way up to a business degree and eventually a seat on the board.

Standing in one of the factories now churning out batteries for the new EQS line of electric cars, Mr. Häberle said he hoped the company would not only survive this transformation but come out stronger on the other side.

The main question, he said, is: Will Germany?

There was a time when he took his country’s export prowess for granted. But now, he said, “Germany is in a defensive crouch.”

A German Hijab

Germany’s car industry helped fuel the country’s postwar economic miracle. And immigrants fueled the car industry. But they don’t really feature in that story.

They were known as “guest workers” and were expected to come, work and leave. Until two decades ago, they had no regular path to citizenship.

Among them were the grandparents of Ikbal Soysal, a young high school teacher in the city of Offenbach, near Frankfurt, whose father worked in a factory making parts for Mercedes.

Ms. Soysal’s generation of immigrant Germans do feature in the story of Germany today. Not only do they have German passports, many have university degrees. They are doctors, entrepreneurs, journalists and teachers.

Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. When Ms. Merkel came into office in South Korean Passport 2005, 18 percent of Germans had at least one parent who was born outside the country. By now it is one in four. In Ms. Soysal’s school in Offenbach, nine in 10 children have at least one parent who emigrated to Germany.

Many of the teachers do, too.

“When I started teaching here, all teachers were Germans with German roots,” the head teacher, Karin Marré-Harrak, said. “Now, nearly half of them have diverse roots.”

Ms. Soysal, a Muslim, always wanted to be a teacher, but she knew it was a risk. There had never been a high school teacher with a head scarf in her state.

So when she was invited for her first job interview, she called ahead to warn the school.

It was 2018. The secretary consulted with the headmaster, who promptly reassured her, “What matters is what’s in your head, not what’s on your head.”

She got that job and others since.

It wasn’t always easy. “The students forget about the head scarf very quickly,” Ms. Soysal said. But some parents complained to the head teacher.

Once, a student asked Ms. Soysal’s advice. The girl was wearing a head Malaysian driver's license online scarf but was unsure about it. “If it doesn’t feel right, you need to take it off,” Ms. Soysal told her.

For her, that is what freedom of religion, enshrined in the German Constitution, is all about. “The thing is, I